Schomburg Center celebrates namesake's 150th birthday with Transcribe-A-Thon

NEW YORK - Wednesday would have been historian Arturo Schomburg's 150th birthday, and the library named for him in Harlem hosted a Transcribe-A-Thon to honor his legacy. 

Volunteers transferred Schomburg's words from page to webpage, capturing snapshots of his journey to explore Black contributions across the globe at the turn of the 20th century.

"You can see who he's writing to, so some of his social networks, and then you can also glean information about what he is collecting," said Barrye Brown, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture's curator of manuscript archives and rare books.

Born Jan. 24, 1874, in Puerto Rico, Schomburg's passion for the past resulted in him curating one of the largest-ever collections of Black History.

"A lot of people think, isn't everything already online, isn't everything all digitized?" said University of Delaware Black History professor Dr. Laura Helton. "But there are 11 million items in this building, and only a fraction of those old books and papers are digitized because it takes a lot of work."

Schomburg Center staff spent most of the pandemic digitizing the documents.

"They are much more widely accessible to the general public," Brown said. "I'm just excited for people to dive into the papers."

Having separate text to accompany them online accommodates every type of reader. The process is so tedious because the documents are so different. Newspaper clippings are easy to read. Schomburg's handwritten letters, not so much. That is why preserving history will always need a human touch.

"AI can't do this kind of work," Helton said.

The library partnered with Fisk University in Nashville for the festivities, celebrating Schomburg's connection to the Historically Black school and furthering his mission to pass on Black stories. Students joined the Schomburg Center via video as they transcribed their own digitized collection of Schomburg's work.

"We live in a moment now where in many states Black history is under attack, and that was true in Schomburg's era, too," emphasized Helton.

Next year the Schomburg Center will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its opening. The efforts of the volunteers will help the library achieve its goal to have a full digital collection.

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